Video marketing for financial services

What does financial video marketing consist of? 

Videos are increasingly becoming the inbound marketing strategy to adopt if you want to connect with new customers or if you need to maintain a solid relationship with existing customers. Before the advent of the internet revolutionized purchasing and consumption paths, financial sector companies employed more traditional forms of communication, such as TV, radio, or print media. Today, digital transformation has made it possible to implement new and more engaging forms of interaction between consumers and brands and has created the conditions for the emergence of high-quality services across a wide range of banking and financial activities.

What financial video marketing is not 

To describe what financial video marketing is, we must first explain what financial video marketing is not.

Financial video marketing is not advertising on television commercials. What differentiates the two types of approaches is the target audience, which no longer remains in silence before, during, and after viewing (as was the case with commercials). On the contrary, in the case of current financial video marketing:

• users watch financial videos when they actually need them (we’re talking about financial video marketing tactics conducted within a data-driven inbound strategy and not an outbound mode)
• the way viewers react produces real effects and has an impact on the personal relationship that they have with the company
• the feedback from their reactions is collected and processed to refine the knowledge of their profile (Did they watch the video? Did they watch it to the end? Did they click on any calls to action in the different sequences? Did they leave a comment?)

In summary: the user of contemporary financial video marketing, unlike the user accustomed to television broadcasting, has a real opportunity to make their voice heard and to receive a response to their needs much more quickly.

What financial video marketing is

Now we’re ready to define financial video marketing: it’s the use of video to promote online financial advisory services. The content it conveys is designed to be integrated within a video marketing strategy and is used to achieve a variety of objectives within different stages of the marketing funnel. By modulating their potential against specific communication objectives, videos for financial services can help:

1. Gain customers’ trust at the top of the funnel
2. Convert in the middle and lower part of the funnel 
3. Engage and nurture in the post sales stage

By placing videos on the home page or service pages of your site or on social media, you can humanize your company’s image, adding an extra dimension to the written texts that helps reduce the distance perceived by customers.

Types of financial videos  

There are many types of videos you can create to help develop a relationship with your target audience, communicate the value of your services, and increase conversions. We have grouped theminto two broad categories: brand videos and product videos.

1. Brand videos don’t directly promote financial products or services but tell the story of a brand’s values and identity. Within this group, “behind-the-scenes” videos can be particularly effective because they can add a face and voice (indeed, many faces and many voices) to your online content, fostering authenticity that can reinforce that feeling of trust on which the very existence of financial organizations is based. Expert interview videos also contribute to the the company’s reputation for trustworthiness by acting on the rationality of the users, who are involved more on the intellectual than the emotional level.
2. Product videos demonstrate how a product or service can be exploited to its fullest potential. By itself, a simple technical description has little value but is extremely effective if it highlights the product or service’s ability to solve concrete problems by showing them in action in one or more contexts of use. Among product videos, explainer videos are particularly popular among financial advisors because they can simply and accurately illustrate why potential clients should pay for their company’s value proposition.

Both brand videos and product videos can be made in live-action or motion graphics. In the latter case, the addition of a voiceover can help detail the value proposition by placing it within an immediately familiar narrative structure.

Why use financial video marketing? 

Financial video marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with customers: video content is undoubtedly the best means to engage, educate, and encourage consumers to take action. More organizations in the industry are integrating video content into their marketing mix in an effort to offer solutions that are responsive to changing consumer expectations and habits.

A sound and up-to-date financial video marketing strategy can address diverse needs: help build an authoritative and memorable brand reputation; boost performance from the company as a whole; and significantly improve the customer experience. Using video is not only smart but is now a must to maintain your competitive edge. Let’s delve into each of these reasons.

1. To build a trust-worthy and memorable brand

For an organization operating in the financial services market, trust is the most valuable asset. But earning consumer trust requires establishing oneself as an authoritative advisor and developing strong brand awareness. Offering educational content that is comprehensive, understandable, and interesting meets both of these goals. Let’s see how.

• Providing education on even complex topics helps to be perceived as a privileged interlocutor, an expert with whom you can establish a relationship of trust. Investing in outreach to increase the financial literacy of your customers is a way to help them make critical decisions and, ultimately, to promote loyalty. Video is the ideal medium for creating engaging and easy-to-understand content on topics that are often perceived as obscure, ambiguous, and out of reach for some audiences. While a lengthy web page of text might discourage consumers looking for strategies for managing their daily budget, a 60-second video featuring the “3 steps to better manage your budget” offers a far more appealing learning perspective. Financial video marketing works across generations but, according to the 2021 Consumer Banking Report, it’s an incredibly smart investment especially if you want to appeal to Millennials and Generation Z.
• Empowering brand identity. Telling your organization’s story through video is one of the most effective ways to build and differentiate your brand. This is because video, by activating a powerful emotional response, can enrich the connection with consumers while making your proposition instantly recognizable. With financial video marketing, you can give life and depth to your company’s personality and culture and convey your company’s value system while keeping things interesting (and not boring) for the viewer.

2. Improving economic performance 

Financial video marketing can make an important contribution to improving business performance, both because it helps to attract new customers better than other tools and because it can be used in your upselling and cross-selling efforts aimed at existing customers. Video offers new opportunities to capture the attention of your target audience, convert viewers into leads, and leverage in-depth content to make personalized follow-ups. 

Video is a suitable tool for any campaign to sell financial products and services. Let’s a look at the following data for some supporting statistics:

• nearly three-quarters of consumers prefer to learn about products and services via video, compared to 11% who prefer text or 4% who would like an infographic; 
• according to 56% of consumers, video motivated them to proceed in their path to purchase financial or investment products.

Financial video marketing is therefore instrumental in convincing users of the superiority of your brand’s commercial offering. For marketers, moreover, leveraging video offers the highest ROI of any media format.

3. Modernizing the customer experience

Financial video marketing plays a crucial role in building positive customer experiences, particularly by enhancing two processes:

• Onboarding customers: videos help build the foundation for a lasting relationship. Welcoming new customers in more personal and engaging ways and creating a positive first impression helps consumers feel part of your community. Videos are also useful for introducing customers to the features of your products and services and informing them about the self-service mobile banking and digital payment apps available to them;
• Customer service: Here is where customer service is quite decisive. More and more consumers now prefer to solve problems themselves rather than call a toll-free number and be on hold indefinitely. Video makes self-service support arrangements easy and convenient, especially if the content is organized in a knowledge base or online resource center. Ninety-three percent of video marketers say that video has reduced the number of support calls they receive. This means that customer service videos modernize your customer service experience: they increase customer satisfaction while reducing the workload on the customer service team.

Babelee: the best tool for a financial video marketing strategy 

The benefits derived from financial video marketing all stem from a single premise made possible by digital transformation: video leverages the customer information a company can now gather from its touch points and channels. Because digital videos are based on individual user data, they enable a more personalized approach.

When consumers click “play,” they reveal a great deal about their interests, problems, habits, and preferences. Advanced financial video marketing takes advantage of the possibilities offered by digitization and the closely related possibilities created by automation. From a strategic point of view, automating communication is crucial for all companies offering financial services, both because automation reduces costs, making processes increasingly efficient and scalable, and because it helps consolidate and develop relationships with customers and markets, providing the information they need in a timely and articulate manner.

With the Babelee video platform—the platform that allows you to create as many videos as you want in a few simple steps—you can keep track of who watched a certain video, when, and for how long. You can feed the tracked data into subsequent videos so that your communications are always more timely and centered on their needs. Babelee’s technology makes your life easier: you’ll be able to enhance your data and scale millions of personalized one-to-one communications, in just a few clicks.

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